The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
The Shuffle Sleeve is a wearable controller for playing music on a smartphone. Shaped as a knitted closed tube that can be slung across one’s shoulders, it functions as a music controller when one puts a handful of coins in it. The Sleeve can be moved around the shoulder to shuffle the coins inside, which will always fall to the bottom due to gravity. It has four pull strings on the outside, dividing it in four equal sections. When tied together, the strings block the coins inside or lock them in a particular section of the sleeve. The location of the coins in the tube and the combination of strings tied serve as the interface to control the music player on the mobile phone. E.g., the coins inside take the role of the playhead: If the sleeve is rotated forward, the music player skips to the next track, if it is rotated backwards, it skips back.